Solidarity 252, 11 July 2012

Take over the banks!

Five years ago, the demand for the public ownership of the banks was the preserve of a small minority of socialists. Today it follows logically from the exposed venality of the banking system. There have now been three waves of banking failure in the recent past. Socialists should use these events to argue relentlessly for state ownership and democratic control of the banking system. First the advent of neoliberalism from the 1970s was premised on the renewed role of finance capital. Finance capital became in Lenin’s words “the typical ruler of the world”. It was “a power that is peculiarly...

Bankers out of NHS!

While Bob Diamond walks away from his job at Barclays with £22 million, his mate, Barclays vice-chair Naguib Kheraj, has secured himself a position on the NHS Commissioning Board, which now oversees the NHS! Senior executives at Barclays have demonstrated they are incapable of running a bank, even on their own terms. But instead of nationalising the banks under social control, our government has put these same bankers in charge of the health system! We need to get rid of Naguib Kheraj from the NHS Commissioning Board — and take the whole of the NHS and the banking sector out of the hands of...

Tories' NHS bonfire continues

As NHS funding flatlines for the third year in a row, A&E departments and maternity services across the country are threatened with closure. As well as looming battles in North West London over A&E services, St Helier in South East London, the Alex Hospital and Worcester Royal in the Midlands, and Prince Phillip Hospital in Llannelli, are all being considered for closure this month. If the government gets its way then we will have one third fewer A&E departments than we had at the last election. The closure of A&E departments and maternity services is usually the first step in shutting down a...

Make Labour fight for NHS

Labour movement activists are organising a lobby of Labour Party conference at the end of September to demand Labour commits to reversing the Tories’ NHS “reforms” and rebuilding our health services. As the Tories’ NHS Health and Social Care Act and their cuts are implemented, there will be numerous local struggles — to stop closures, defend services and resist the expansion of privatisation. Such struggles are vital; they are the essential material from which a more powerful movement to defend the NHS will be built. At the same time, we cannot defend the health service piecemeal. We need to...

Higgs is here!

In January, we reported that CERN was tentatively claiming that Higgs bosons had been created in high energy collisions of hadrons in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) (“Higgs ahoy!”, Solidarity 229, 11 January 2012). They were not certain enough that the signals detected were those of Higgs bosons and said they would be searching further this year, after the LHC’s scheduled shutdown and re-opening. Now, after analysing trillions and trillions more proton-proton collisions, they have come up with enough evidence to have “5 sigma” certainty (99.99997%) that they have discovered the Higgs boson*...

Wikileaks yes, Assange no

Several months ago, there was an image going around social networking sites of Julian Assange and Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire owner of Facebook. The caption next to the image of Assange was: “I give private information on corporations to you for free, and I’m the villain”. The caption next to Zuckerberg was: “I give your private information to corporations for money, and I’m man of the year.” While Zuckerberg is obviously a class enemy, Assange is a suspected rapist. Yet many comrades – some who describe themselves as feminists — were still posting this image. In recent weeks many leading...

Save the Women's Library campaign discusses strategy

Campaigners hoping to save The Women’s Library at London Metropolitan University held their first public meeting on 6 July. This follows the campaign’s success in garnering support with an online petition that has attracted 12, 000 signatories. The Women’s Library, currently housed in Lottery-funded, purpose-built premises, is under threat from management cuts. This is not only about a detrimental cut to a vital women’s service but about the future of Higher Education. It will contribute to the government’s vision of a two-tier Higher Education system, in which wealthy “Russell Group”...

Privatising homes will endanger children

We need to be very clear. The Tories don’t care that the most vulnerable children in society have been exploited and abused. They are not even that interested in saving money. BBC Newsnight’s coverage on 3 July was part of the propaganda to justify the continued attack on working-class people. We should remember the way that the media respond when children from wealthier backgrounds go missing. If looked-after children received comparable column inches, papers would be full of pictures of missing children on a daily basis. The tragic fact is that 2,036 separate “missing from care” episodes...

Students will march in November

The National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts welcomes NUS’s announcement of a national demo in autumn, called for 21 November. NCAFC will be lending its full support to this demonstration, and activists all over the country will be building for maximum possible mobilisation in London on the day. However, we know that this will not be enough to stop the government’s onslaught against students, education workers and young people. It is important that the student movement moves off the defensive and sets out its vision of an alternative to Tory class war — free education, funded by taxing the rich...

Solidarity with Spanish miners!

Up to 100 billion euros for bankers and nothing for the workers! Sounds familiar? Yes it’s the turn of Spanish bankers to receive a massive handout from the Eurocrats in Brussels. It should come as a surprise to no-one that not a single euro will go towards helping the Spanish workers who now face the highest unemployment rates in Europe and vicious cuts in welfare and social spending. Spanish miners, as of 9 July in their sixth week of indefinite strike against the withdrawal of substantial subsidies to their industry, will certainly not expecting even a tiny percentage of these staggering...

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